Olmert Holds On for Now, Despite Huge Public Outcry

Published: May 4, 2007

More than 100,000 protesters gathered in Rabin Square here on Thursday night to urge Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his government to resign. The call followed the release of a damning report on the performance of the Israeli leadership during the war in Lebanon last summer.

It was the latest challenge to the beleaguered Mr. Olmert, who has refused to resign, and the first mass demonstration since the war, which many Israelis saw as a failure.

The police would not put an immediate figure on the size of the crowd, but Israeli news reports put the number around 150,000. The rally organizers said attendance was closer to 200,000. The protesters represented a wide cross-section of Israeli society, and while the mood was not aggressive, it was insistent.

''I grew up in the lap of Zionism and I want to believe there can be change in the highest ranks,'' said Ronen Amsalem, a 32-year-old man with a ponytail who works in computers in Tel Aviv and serves as a soldier in the reserves. ''It scares me that I could be sent to war or on an operation without a goal.''

Vita Wacholder, 65, came to the rally from the northern city of Haifa, which was hit by Hezbollah rocket fire during the war. ''I went through the Holocaust and hell to come to heaven here,'' she said. ''Everyone can make a mistake,'' she said of the country's current leadership, ''but not to take responsibility is wrong.''

As the demonstrators began to disperse about 10 p.m., Mr. Olmert's spokeswoman, Miri Eisin, would not comment on whether they would have any effect. She said only that the prime minister's schedule for the next week was already full with ''regular work meetings.''

Earlier on Thursday politicians from across the political spectrum called for Mr. Olmert's resignation at a special parliamentary session called in the wake of the war report.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the head of the rightist opposition party Likud, said that ''as a result of the last war, it seems to many of our enemies that a weak hand grasps the Sword of David.'' He said the leadership had to be changed.

Mr. Netanyahu had broken a three-day silence on the findings of the report on Thursday morning, when he told Army Radio: ''It's clear to all that this government lost the last scrap of public trust, if it ever had any. It's clear to all that it should return to the people and let them speak their minds.''

Mr. Netanyahu, who favors early elections, has consistently come out as the front-runner for the prime minister's job in recent opinion polls.

During the parliamentary session, Danny Yatom, a lawmaker from the Labor Party, which is part of Mr. Olmert's governing coalition, also called on Mr. Olmert to resign, as did members of the leftist opposition.

The interim report on the war, released Monday, placed responsibility for what it described as Israel's ''severe failures'' squarely on the shoulders of Mr. Olmert, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and the former army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz. General Halutz resigned in January, and Mr. Peretz has announced that he will leave the Defense Ministry after primaries in his Labor Party late this month, if not sooner.

But Mr. Olmert has declared his intention of staying in office to oversee the carrying out of the report's recommendations, and most of the senior members of his party have given him their support, at least for the time being.

By Wednesday evening, he had quashed a budding mutiny within his own Kadima Party. Tzipi Livni, Mr. Olmert's deputy and foreign minister, called on him to resign on Wednesday afternoon.

But she did not herself resign, and she announced that she would not work to oust the prime minister at this stage, disappointing many Olmert critics who had hoped that she would spearhead an internal rebellion.

Ms. Livni did announce her intention of running for the leadership of Kadima in primaries ''when the time comes.'' But she received a roasting from Israel's leading political commentators, who called her leadership abilities into question.

Despite their harsh criticism of the country's leaders, the members of the official committee that investigated the conduct of the war, headed by a retired judge, Eliyahu Winograd, said they would not ''replace the usual decision-making processes and determine who should serve as a minister or senior military commander.''

They did say that they would reconsider the matter of ''personal recommendations'' with the publication of their final report this summer.

Most senior members in Mr. Olmert's party appear to have decided to give him some breathing room until then. There is little appetite within the governing coalition, or among most members of the current Parliament, for calling a new election 13 months after the last one.

Many believe that Mr. Olmert's political fate, for now, lies largely in the hands of the public. About two-thirds of Israelis would like to see him go, according to recent opinion polls. It remains to be seen whether Thursday night's rally was a one-time event or the beginning of a protest movement that will maintain its momentum.

Popular protests after the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 gathered pace over a number of months. They eventually led to the resignation of Prime Minister Golda Meir and her defense minister, Moshe Dayan, even though a state commission of inquiry had cleared both of any personal responsibility for the failure of the intelligence apparatus to predict the initial Egyptian attack.

Preparations for Thursday's rally were being made long before the publication of the Winograd report, based on an assumption that it would be highly critical. It was organized by a coalition of civil action groups, including embittered army reservists, bereaved parents of soldiers who died in the war, the student association and movements for clean government.

At the helm was Uzi Dayan, a retired major general and former national security adviser who now heads a centrist political group called Tafnit, or Turning Point, which lobbies for security and against corruption. Tafnit competed in the 2006 elections but did not gain enough votes to win a seat in Parliament.

The organizers decided ahead of time not to let politicians address the rally, to draw as wide a range of protesters as possible. Instead, popular musicians performed, and respected authors addressed the crowd.

In a speech at the rally, General Dayan said: ''There are moments when you have to say 'Enough.' We are turning to the leadership and saying 'Enough.' ''

The keynote speaker, Meir Shalev, a renowned author, said: ''Ehud Olmert, you said you work for us. Olmert, you are fired!''

Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, formerly known as Kings of Israel Square, has a special significance to Israelis as the location of several events in contemporary history. It was renamed for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated after attending a peace rally there in 1995.

The rally ended with a public rendition of the national anthem, ''Hatikvah,'' whose title means hope, followed by a more modern anthem, John Lennon's ''Imagine.''

Photos: Prime Minister Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni listened yesterday as Parliament debated a report on the war in Lebanon. (Photo by David Silverman/Getty Images); Israelis from the left and right rallied last night in Tel Aviv to call for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to resign. (Photo by Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times)